Search This Blog

Posts

My boss doesn't read my blog, so I can comfortably reveal that I am never in a hurry to get to work. Okay, that's not quite true. Not the part about not reading my blog, because I don't think she does. And that's okay. I mean the part about not being in rush to get to work. I ride a bicycle. So, it's definitionally difficult to rush to work. If I really put my legs and lungs to the task and get lucky with the traffic lights and nothing strange like a cement truck happens to me, then, maybe, I can shave a couple of minutes off my commute time, tops. That's what I mean by not being in a rush to get to work.

I do leave early to compensate, though. (That's in case she reads this one.)

All of this is to say that instead of ringing my bell and requesting-forcing passage by the dog-walking couple in front of me this morning on the MacKinnon Ravine bridge, I hung back, pedalled slowly, looked east to the downtown skyline, west up the spruce-lined valley, down at m…

We mistake what for why—and how! And it's almost certainly easier to see that fact when the who doing the mistaking is you and not me. What am I talking about?

I've been thinking about this little episode since it happened last Friday after work:

"Can I still get out this door?" I asked the security guard. "Just quick?"

It was just after 6 pm and that meant the security guard was installing a cordon to prevent people from using that side door to get out of the building. I was tired, I was carrying loaded bicycle panniers, I was questioning how I overlooked a potential danger at work, and all that emotional chop mean I didn't really want to walk around the building to get to the bike cage, which was just on the other side of the barred door.

"Sorry, no," he said with a kind of slow-motion, toothless smile.

I knew that was coming. I turned around, but then turned back and asked: "Why not? Why can't I just quickly scootch under?"

I thought it peculiar that Bowie somehow had an actual age. David Bowie, 69, the news said. That struck me as very earthy. And wrong in a way that can't be fixed as far as we know. And then as quite understandable given Bowie's mediated and ageless presence.

My friend David Blatt gets it right with this memory of growing up in Edmonton and learning about David Bowie. And trying to get a glimpse of yourself in the mirror after learning about David Bowie. Of all the automatic bleat written about Bowie's legacy, Blatt verbs the truth. Bowie thrilled and confused and slightly frightened us. Thanks, David.

"Are you sad that Bowie died?" a friend at work asked
"I am," I said.

"Bowie news makes me sad," I wrote another friend on Twitter. "But want to live." Not sure where that "but want to live" came from. It wasn't there when I started writing the firs…